Monthly Archives: August 2016

Beach_Boys_PROGRAM

Free downloadable program of The Beach Boys from Endless Summer Quarterly. Endless Summer Quarterly’s FREE Collectable 2016 Beach Boys TOUR PROGRAM is complete with full color pictures and built in links to purchase tickets to upcoming Beach Boys shows.

Dave Acosta, El Paso Times 2:58 p.m. MDT August 19, 2016

El Paso music lovers will soon be picking up some “Good Vibrations” when The Beach Boys, led by singer Mike Love, head to the Abraham Chavez Theatre in Downtown on Aug. 26.

Love and the current Beach Boys lineup, which includes longtime band member Bruce Johnston, are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the song, which is one of the band’s most enduring and influential hits.

Love co-founded the band in 1961 alongside his cousins, Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson and friend Al Jardine. Dennis died in 1983, as did Carl in 1998. But, while Brian Wilson, the group’s chief songwriter during its heyday, and Jardine have played with the group sporadically since the 1970s, including a 50th anniversary tour and album in 2011, it has been Love who has carried the torch for The Beach Boys for all 55 years of the band’s existence.

Love is just as enthusiastic about taking the sunny vibes to global audiences as the day the group was formed, he said in a phone interview from his home in California.

“Last year we went to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, England and Germany,” Love said. “We live up to the song title, ‘I Get Around,’ and the audience response is so great. Five decades after we started getting all those hit songs in the ’60s, those songs still go over.”

Those hits include a string of songs that Love co-wrote with Brian Wilson, including “Help Me Rhonda,” “California Girls” and “I Get Around.”

Love also co-wrote The Beach Boys’ biggest hit, “Kokomo,” alongside John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. The song went to No. 1 in 1988, giving The Beach Boys one of the longest spans between chart-topping hits in Billboard history.

“Good Vibrations” was the group’s previous No. 1 in 1966.

“‘Good Vibrations’ — when I first heard the track, it was really funky, almost an R&B kind of thing,” Love said. “It was done over several months. Brian came up with different sections and tempos.”

Before singing the song’s familiar chorus over the phone, Love said that he had come up with the familiar melody, but not the words, when Brian Wilson summoned him to the studio to complete the song.

“I dictated the words to a poem that became the verses to my wife at the time, Suzanne, on my way to the studio,” Love said. “Brian had asked me to write lyrics and I hadn’t done it yet. I was literally dictating it as I was driving. I had visions of a girl that was into peace, love, flower power — all that psychedelic stuff that was going on in the ’60s. I wrote a psychedelic poem to complement the psychedelic vibes of the song.”

Love said it’s a “bummer” that the rest of the original Beach Boys haven’t always been along for the ride, and it was hard losing his cousins Dennis, who drowned, and Carl, to cancer, but he will continue The Beach Boys’ legacy for as long as fans demand it and he is able.

And although Brian Wilson and Jardine, as well as other surviving members of the group, joined The Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour, Love said the arrangement was “sometimes problematic” and “primarily done for the fans.”

Although Love and others helped write many of The Beach Boys’ hits, it’s Brian Wilson who has gotten the majority of critical acclaim as the group’s chief songwriter. While Wilson remained a member of the group throughout the 1970s, he ceased touring with the band for the most part in the 1960s.

Still, Love said, he doesn’t hold any bitterness toward Wilson and doesn’t feel underappreciated by fans.

“I think I get plenty of credit,” Love said. “Where I didn’t get credit, sometimes, was the songwriting. But my book documents those parts of my story. I co-wrote songs I didn’t receive credit on. I’ve always been the lead singer and I co-wrote some of our biggest hits. Our biggest hit is ‘Kokomo’ and Brian wasn’t even on that record.”

Love will release his autobiography, written with James S. Hirsch, “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy,” on Sept. 13. Love said the book not only tells his side of The Beach Boys story but also his own humble beginnings.

“There’ve been hundreds of thousands of words written about The Beach Boys,” Love said. “I’ve never written a book and I’m the one person who’s been in the group since the beginning. It starts with the inspiration that came from my mom’s side of the family, which was a musical family. They were poor, they came to California during the Dust Bowl of Kansas and slept on the beach for a couple of months before finding a place to live.”

Love said that besides touring and the book, he has been “stockpiling songs over the years.” The Beach Boys’ last album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” coincided with the band’s 50th anniversary and featured all of its surviving members, including Love, Brian Wilson, Jardine, Johnston and guitarist David Marks, who first performed with The Beach Boys on the song “Little Deuce Coup” in 1963.

Love said he hopes The Beach Boys will release new material, written primarily by himself and in collaboration with other musicians, later this year or in early 2017.

“It’s songs I’ve recorded and never come out with,” Love said. “Sort of like the book. It’s the story I’ve never told.”

Until then, “the beat goes on,” Love said.

“It’s a blessing to take these songs I made with my cousins and that became successful and perform them five decades after writing them,” Love said.

By BAILIE MYERS

For Amarillo Globe-News

The iconic Beach Boys are making their way to Amarillo for a pair of shows on Saturday.

The performances are part of the legendary group’s “50 years of Good Vibrations Tour.”

“Good Vibrations was the big hit of the ’60s,” said Mike Love, a founding member of the group. “It’s so great to see the songs you did so many years ago still have the same enthusiasm among the crowd at our concerts.”

Love and Bruce Johnston lead the band, which also includes Jeffery Foskett, Time Bonhomme, Brian Eichenburger, John Cowsill and Scott Totten.

“We are obsessed with recreating those songs you’ve always heard on the radio,” Love said.

In 2013, the group released “Sounds of Summer,” a triple-
platinum album with more than 3 million copies sold. Along with its companion album, “The Warmth of the Sun,” the band made a renaissance in the music world.

Love thinks the lasting effect their music has had on hundreds of thousands of fans is nothing short of amazing.

“We see multiple generations turn out to our shows, and I think that’s awesome,” he said. “For those in my generation, it’s nostalgic … but for younger people just discovering the music, it’s like going back in time.”

Though this isn’t the first time the Beach Boys have played in Amarillo, Love said the concerts in smaller markets are always special.

“People really respond,” he said.

The evening concert sold out so quickly that the promoters asked the group if they would be willing to perform a matinee. Love said the answer was an absolute yes.

It will be the first chance for many Texas Panhandle residents to set their eyes on the legendary group.

“I’ve been a fan since I was a little girl,” Amarilloan Christina Bettag said. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw they were going to be in Amarillo.”

Bettag will join several family members at the concert, thanks to pursuing a package deal of tickets after they were initially sold out.

The astounding turnout is evidence of the Beach Boys’ mass following to this day.

Though the group is celebrating the major success of their records in the ’60s, Love said they are in awe of the blessings in the present.

“(The ’60s were) a rich musical time,” he said. “We still have the benefit of the foundation that success built.”

August 19, 2016

A very special thing took place last night in Ohio.

First, the packed house was exuberant and on fire!! They came to party on a hot summer’s night. The electric feeling in the air was amplified by a unique blast from the past. In 1964 we played a show at a small note club popular with teens and did two sets. The prices were unbelievably inexpensive back then. Anyway the Saxophone I was playing was left behind. After all this time, I was reunited with that saxophone last night! It happened because of the kind efforts of Marsha and Greg Ward that I was reunited with my Sax over 50 years later. The Ward family could not have been nicer and yes, they joined us on stage for “Barbara Ann” for our encore last night at Huber Heights.

See the rest of the story and photos @ https://www.facebook.com/OfficialMikeLove/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1098595196885987

August 12, 2016

L.Kent Wolgamott/Lincoln Journal Star

The Beach Boys were happy to be in Pinnacle Bank Arena Thursday.

So were the 4,800 in attendance who made it to the concert while thunder rolled and rain poured down on Pinewood Bowl, where the show was supposed to happen.

“I’m so glad we moved inside,” said singer Mike Love. “It would have been brutal trying to do a concert in that weather tonight. Brilliant move to move it inside. This is a nice place too.”

That comment came after the sixth of 33 songs by the Beach Boys, who ended the main set with “Good Vibrations,” the song that gives this 50th anniversary tour its title.

It’s also the 50th anniversary of “Pet Sounds,” the band’s best album of the ’60s.

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys composer and producer, played the entire album in Council Bluffs last month with his band that included Beach Boy Al Jardine.

Love’s Beach Boys, which includes longtime member Bruce Johnston, did three “Pet Sounds” songs, “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” and a very nice “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” that measured up to the Wilson band’s version.

There was also a hot-rod segment with “Little Deuce Coupe,” “409” and “Shut You Down,” a harmony rich “Don’t Worry Baby,” an organ pumping “California Girls” and a cover of Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” that linked the Boys harmonies with street corner singing.

The six-piece band with Love and Johnston sounded good on the system that was moved inside for the show, and the simple-as-arena-shows-go staging and lighting did the job as well.

The Temptations minus an ill Ron Tyson opened with a spirited 45-minute set. Backed by their 5-man touring band and a 10-piece horn section made up of local players, the four Tempts delivered the sharp suits, steps and classic Motown songs.

Beach Boys and Temptations combined for a fun, satisfying show that would have washed out at Pinewood. That would have been a shame.